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Popular Culture Review
ESTRAGON: Let’s go.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.
ESTRAGON: (despairingly) Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was
here?
VLADIMIR: What?
ESTRAGON: That we were to wait?
VLADIMIR: He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do
you see any others? . . .
ESTRAGON: He should be here.
VLADIMIR: He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
ESTRAGON: And if he doesn’t come?
VLADIMIR: We’ll come back to-morrow.
ESTRAGON: And then the day after to-morrow?
VLADIMIR: Possibly.
ESTRAGON: And so on.
VLADIMIR: The point is—
ESTRAGON: Until he comes.
VLADIMIR; You’re merciless.'"
We are merciless readers. Grover says: “Let’s go. Let’s stop turning pages.” We
respond: “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for the monster at the end of
the book.”
What would it mean for Godot to show up in Beckett’s play? The
drama famously concludes without resolution, without any real sense, even, of
what is at stake in whether or not Godot shows up in the end (other than the fact
that the waiting would be over). There are those who see Godot as God; there
are those who see the waiting as hopelessly in vain. But what interests us is the
mercilessness of the mundane and the anxiety of living itself Perhaps we share
with Grover his sense of dread. Perhaps there is the collective feeling that we
may all be waiting for Godot. But at the end of this particular play, we know that
the monster will show up in his place—yet not really even “show up,” as he was
there and not-there all along, for Grover is, after all, afraid of himself. And this
invites a third reading of the text.
Let us consider the possibility that the best way to understand this book
is to see it as a psychoanalytic narrative. I do not mean to apply here an
Linthoughtful armchair Freudian analysis to Sesame Street characters in the way
that some—especially conservative media critics—have recently tried to do as
in, for instance, the insistence that Bert and Ernie are a closeted gay couple.
Sadly, the consequence of this particular critique has been that Sesame Street is
no longer producing new segments where Bert and Ernie are seen together—as
if even an unacknowledged possibility of such sexual orientation would
somehow be bad. It is not, then, some hidden message that I want to pursue. I.
would not wish to maintain that the Cookie Monster has an eating disorder or